The pharmaceutical industry and the American Medical Association (AMA) are running scared—very scared. In fact, jackrabbits have more courage right now than they do. After having created a near-monopoly in medical care that has endured 100 years since the Flexner Report came out in 1910 with its hatchet job against competitive health treatments such as homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine, this drug and medical mafia has kept a jealous and vigilant watch over its monopolistic commercial privileges.

The hazy, smoggy skies over Beijing over those March days were emblematic of the Codex meetings that the National Health Federation (NHF) was attending for many days in China. The sun only shimmered as a strange, pale orange globe, casting an ethereal, almost futuristic “Bladerunner” look to the cityscape while city residents glided silently past with white face masks as we Codex delegates and staff worked inside in overheated rooms on international food-additive standards. Given what transpired, the setting seemed apt.

For anyone doing business in California, Proposition 65’s history is well-known by now both within and outside that state. In November 1986, California voters approved ballot Proposition 65 in the belief that its passage would help protect them from toxic chemicals in the environment. Officially entitled the “Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986,” almost everyone these days simply calls it Prop 65.

The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses (CCNFSDU) just finished a week-long (December 3–7) meeting in Bad Soden, a small German city near Frankfurt am Main. Nearly 300 delegates were in attendance, composed of government functionaries and international non-governmental organization (INGO) representatives. So, for one week, the assembled delegates—including the INGO delegation of the National Health Federation (NHF)—met, discussed and debated a wide number of food and food-supplement issues, including the controversial draft Nutrient Reference Values (NRVs) for vitamins and minerals.

We left off in Part One with this: “The facilitated session ended, as had all of the others, with no consensus on ractopamine. But, as it turned out, finding consensus on ractopamine at this meeting had never been in the game plan for the pro-ractopamine forces.”

It sounded like doom. After having taken a vote by secret ballot on July 5th, the Chairman of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, Mr. Sanjay Dave, solemnly announced the results of the voting on whether or not ractopamine1 standards were adopted. Out of 143 ballots cast, the vote was 69 for ractopamine, 67 against ractopamine, with seven abstaining. If only one vote had shifted from the “for” camp to the “against” camp, then the result would have been completely different and the ractopamine standard would have been defeated.

The decision of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not been officially announced as of this column’s writing, but Senate staff confirms that, on June 19th, Senators Tom Harkin and Orrin Hatch were informed in a personal meeting with FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Deputy Commissioner Mike Taylor that a revision of the FDA’s Draft Guidance for Industry: Dietary Supplements: New Dietary Ingredient Notifications and Related Issues may be attempted in the future.

There were 20 of them, cute and innocent as could be. The farmer raised his shotgun and pumped one shot after another into each one of them, killing every last piglet, and their mothers too. This was heart-wrenching for the farmer, but he knew he had no choice since the State of Michigan was about to descend upon him with a SWAT-style team intending to arrest him as a felon if any of his pigs were found alive on his property. His crime? Harboring an animal that the State had designated as an “invasive species”. And this farmer’s tragedy was not the only one to play out in the State; there were thousands of others facing similar dilemmas.

Not too long ago, I was at the Clark’s Nutrition store in Palm Desert, CA. Well-stocked and so clean you could eat off of the floor, this store had another equally impressive side to it that caught my eye: a Value Added Information Center. Not only could you buy what you needed for your body, but you could also get what you needed to nourish your mind.

It would take at least a slim volume to provide you with all of the necessary nuances of preparing your own trademark application. An article can hardly do it justice, so if you want to protect your trademark and feel uncomfortable about doing it yourself, consult with an attorney qualified in trademark matters and have that attorney prepare and file your application. If, on the other hand, you want to protect a trademark you created through a Federal trademark registration (valid in all 50 states and territories), and feel that you could handle an online form, then, here is your brief guide.